TV and Radio

Duane Dudek | On TV/Radio

The clusters of political commercials pro and con that air back to back on local TV have left many of us exhausted and battered. The only winners in this air war are the stations airing the ads. »Read Full Article

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Duane - Did FOX6 mention why they're using the Real Milwaukee set for the temporary set for the news, and not the very nice Wakeup News set? This is especially odd to me, since the Real Milwaukee set is (to my knowledge) a part of the studio they are remodeling.

It's not uncommon for a TV studio to have more than one set in it. Over the years news sets have grown larger and larger in size so today a studio may be able to only accommodate perhaps just two or at most three sets given the need for some cameras to be back far enough for wide shots. Actually I am surprised the news does not originate from a temporary set in the newsroom since this could be done with portable field type cameras along with portable lighting equipment.

True enough, except "Real Milwaukee" isn't really a separate set at all. It is attached to the main news set, and in fact was previously an interview section of the news set.

As long as they have the "Wakeup" studio, there would be no reason at all (that I can see) for them to film from the newsroom. Besides, WITI's newsroom is rather small, and not really designed to accommodate filming a full show there. They really only have room for the camera and one seat that they use for newsroom reports.

If "Wakeup" weren't available, I think that they might still have a blank performance studio that they could film from. If not, the atrium would be the next best option. Lighting would be ridiculously hard there (they'd be best off to tarp over the skylights, I'd think) and the rough floor would not work for tracking in with pedestal cameras.

A one-hour telethon? That's not very long? Jerry Lewis' telethons used to last 20 hours as did many local telethons in the Green Bay TV market for causes like cerebal palsey on WBAY-TV for something like 30 years and in the early 70s WLUK-TV 11 used to run a near 30-hour telethon for the Rawhide Boys Ranch.

I guess this along with the significant shortening of the Muscular Dystrophy Telethon shows just how short Americans' attention spans have become. I used to be a newspaper reporter in the first half of the 1990s. I used to challenge my managing editor at the West Bend Daily News over how long news and feature stories should be. He bought hook, line and sinker whatever the overpaid Thomson consultants in the Chicago suburbs were telling him. That meant really short stories since they wanted to copy the model of USA Today even though that paper was losing money year after year. Meanwhile I believed news stories and feature articles needed to have depth and detail, which was something The Milwauke Journal did very well.